Building a Manifest

(See What is a Deployment? for an introduction to deployments.)

A deployment is a collection of VMs, persistent disks and other resources. To create a deployment in the Director, it has to be described with a deployment manifest. Most deployment manifests look something like this:

---
name: zookeeper

releases:
- name: zookeeper
  version: 0.0.5
  url: https://bosh.io/d/github.com/cppforlife/zookeeper-release?v=0.0.5
  sha1: 65a07b7526f108b0863d76aada7fc29e2c9e2095

stemcells:
- alias: default
  os: ubuntu-xenial
  version: latest

update:
  canaries: 2
  max_in_flight: 1
  canary_watch_time: 5000-60000
  update_watch_time: 5000-60000

instance_groups:
- name: zookeeper
  azs: [z1, z2, z3]
  instances: 5
  jobs:
  - name: zookeeper
    release: zookeeper
    properties: {}
  vm_type: default
  stemcell: default
  persistent_disk: 10240
  networks:
  - name: default

- name: smoke-tests
  azs: [z1]
  lifecycle: errand
  instances: 1
  jobs:
  - name: smoke-tests
    release: zookeeper
    properties: {}
  vm_type: default
  stemcell: default
  networks:
  - name: default

(Taken from https://github.com/cppforlife/zookeeper-release/blob/master/manifests/zookeeper.yml)

Here is how deployment manifest describes a reasonably complex Zookeeper cluster:

1. Zookepeer source code, configuration file, startup scripts
   • include zookeeper release version 0.0.5 to the releases section
2. Operating system image onto which install software
   • include latest version of ubuntu-xenial stemcell
3. Create 5 Zookeeper VMs spread
   • add zookeeper instance group with instances: 5
4. Spread VMs over multiple availability zones
   • add azs: [z1, z2, z3]
5. Install Zookeeper software onto VMs
   • add zookeeper job to this instance group
6. Size VMs in the same way
   • add vm_type: default which references VM type from cloud config
7. Attach a 10GB persistent disk to each Zookeeper VM
   • add persistent_disk: 10240 to zookeeper instance group
8. Place VMs onto some network
   • add networks: [{name: default}] to zookeeper instance group
9. Provide a way to smoke test Zookeeper cluster
   • add smoke-tests instance group with smoke-tests job from Zookeeper release

Refer to manifest v2 schema for detailed breakdown.

Once manifest is complete referenced stemcells and releases must be uploaded.